Sports tourism now in fo­cus

Or­ford MNA Pierre Reid is invit­ing peo­ple of the Mem­phrem­a­gog MRC to take notice of the lo­cal de­vel­op­ment gen­er­ated by sport tourism which hasn’t stopped grow­ing in the Mem­phrem­a­gog re­gion.

Par­tic­i­pat­ing in a day of re­flec­tion on tourism or­ga­nized by the Mem­phrem­a­gog CLD, Mr. Reid named the many sport­ing events that have taken place in the re­gion in the last few years. In his opin­ion, all of the events at­tract sev­eral thou­sand vis­i­tors from out­side of the Estrie, rep­re­sent­ing a po­ten­tial clien­tele for the area’s many tourist des­ti­na­tions.

“All of these events have one thing in com­mon: sports or recre­ational ac­tiv­i­ties. In cer­tain cases, we are talk­ing about ex­treme com­pe­ti­tions; in oth­ers, we are talk­ing about ac­tiv­i­ties for large groups of peo­ple that al­low com­peti­tors be­tween the ages of 7 and 77 to unite,” said Mr. Reid. “These events take place in both win­ter and sum­mer; we should take a closer look at this new tourism.”

Mr. Reid is propos­ing to cre­ate a cal­en­dar of all these events for the 2013 sea­son, to let ev­ery­one know well in ad­vance about the ar­rival of the thou­sands of vis­i­tors to the Mem­phrem­a­gog re­gion. “Be­cause be­sides the com­peti­tors, there are also those who ac­com­pany them and the spec­ta­tors who come to watch. It makes for a lot of vis­i­tors to the re­gion,” added Mr. Reid.

The launch of this cal­en­dar would al­low busi­ness own­ers, res­tau­rant and ho­tel own­ers to pre­pare for the ar­rival of these large groups of tourists, per­haps or­ga­niz­ing pro­mo­tional pack­ages as well.

Fur­ther­more, Mr. Reid is con­vinced that these vis­i­tors should be in­formed about what the re­gion has to of­fer be­sides the sport­ing event that they have come for. To do this, he will col­lab­o­rate with Jac­ques Mar­coux, the mayor of Pot­ton and the pres­i­dent of the CLD.